Professor Rebecca Randell

Profile

I joined the School of Healthcare, University of Leeds, in July 2012 as a Senior Translational Research Fellow. I was made a Lecturer in July 2015 and promoted to Associate Professor in August 2017. I moved to the University of Bradford in January 2020 as Professor in Digital Innovations in Healthcare.

My first degree, from Durham University, was in Software Engineering. I obtained my PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Glasgow University in 2004. Before joining the School of Healthcare, I undertook postdoctoral appointments in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, in the Centre for HCI Design at City University London, and in the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Leeds. 

Research interests

Although I have a background in software engineering, my research is very much focused on the social, understanding how healthcare professionals carry out their work in order to inform the design of health IT to support that work and understanding how health IT is used in practice. I have studied medical and nursing handover in a variety of hospital settings, histopathologists making diagnoses at the microscope, and multidisciplinary team meetings. I have carried out research into nurses’ customisation of equipment in the intensive care unit, nurses’ use of computerised decision support systems, the effect of novel hardware solutions on GP-patient communication, the impact of a virtual reality microscope on time to diagnosis in histopathology, and the impact of a wall-sized display on collaboration in undergraduate and postgraduate pathology teaching. This understanding is achieved largely through qualitative methods, focusing on the use of observations supported by interviews. I also have a particular interest in realist evaluation and, more recently, I have begun to use video to capture interaction with and around health IT. I also have experience of undertaking systematic reviews, surveys, and more experimental approaches to evaluation. In 2004, I was awarded the Diana E. Forsythe Award by the American Medical Informatics Association for research at the intersection of informatics and the social sciences.

During my time in the School of Healthcare, I led an NIHR Health Services & Delivery Research (HS&DR) funded realist evaluation of the impact of robotic surgery on teamwork in the operating theatre and was co-investigator on an NIHR HS&DR funded study looking at the introduction of quality dashboards in the NHS. Currently I am leading an NIHR HS&DR funded project to develop and evaluate QualDash, a quality dashboard that supports clinical teams, quality and safety committees, and NHS Trust boards to better understand and make use of National Clinical Audit data, and I am also co-investigator on an NIHR HS&DR funded realist review of the impact of networked IT on patient safety.

I am Chair of the European Federation of Medical Informatics (EFMI) working group on Human and Organisational Issues in Medical Informatics and I sit on the EFMI Council. I am a member of the NIHR HS&DR Researcher-Led Panel.

Qualifications

• PhD Human-Computer Interaction
• BSc (Hons) Software Engineering

Research groups and institutes

• People, systems and services